THE HEAD OF DRAKULA

Slowly I walked around the small, dim-lit store. Long,
rectangular wooden benches stacked high with an enormous
collection of used clothing, faded bronze or copper knickknacks,
and antique bonbonniére, divided the single room into four thin
aisles. The front of the store was comprised of one great
floor-to-ceiling length plate-glass window, giving a clear view
of the busy street outside and the passing people from the knees
down. The other three walls were covered in bookcases
containing literally thousands of one-centimetre thick, near new
Mills and Boon paperback romantic novels, priced at thirty cents
each.

Fine cobwebs and a thin patina of dust coated everything,
seeming almost to increase before my eyes. As though sensing my
thoughts, a large, hairy black spider dropped a thin line from
the jaundice-yellow ceiling and scampered down to the glossy
surface of a fleshy pink paperback. For a few moments the
spider crawled around the cover, as though reading the title,
before returning to its mooring rope to swiftly scamper back up,
to disappear amid an assortment of dirty black spots that covered
the ceiling. 'My feelings exactly!'I thought, never one for
romantic novels.

As
my feet began to ache, I looked up toward the plate glass window,
wondering what chance I had of getting home in time for dinner.
My wife, Irene, had on more than one occasion thrown my food into
the rubbish bin when I had been more than ten minutes late. As
Irene loved to say,"If I can find the time to cook it, the least you can do
is be home in time to eat it. Instead of wasting your precious
time and our money browsing through dirty, second-hand
shops!"

I
must admit that Irene is right: I do have a mania for browsing
through broken down second-hand shops; buying all manner of
unrelated brass or wooden relics from bygone eras. Our
mantelpiece and the tops of the cupboards and counters at home
are laden with dozens of small souvenirs from my frequent forays
into the past. Much to the disgust of Irene who often bemoans
not only the effect it has on our Visa Card, but also the extra
work it creates for her, since she has to shift every piece by
hand when cleaning and dusting.

This time, however, it look as though our Visa would get
off scot-free, and I would get home in time to beat the garbage
bin to my dinner, I hoped, glancing down at my antique iron fob
watch -- the prize from a recent foray into second-hand
paradise.

I
had nearly reached the front of the shop again, moving down the
last aisle, and still no treasure had caught my eye. But then,
at the very front of the counter, only a step or two from the
front door, where I should have seen it the instant I had entered
the store, half an hour earlier, sat a large, black wooden
box.

A
gleeful sounding "Ha hum" caught my attention. I looked up
toward the proprietor of the shop, Stefan Bathory, a tall,
grey-haired old man of seemingly a hundred years of age, if not
decidedly more, who stood half a step away from me. For the
previous half an hour the old man had been following me around
the shop, producing prices out of his head if I so much as
glanced toward a faded plaster bust of Napoleon, or a chipped
walnut clock. As I stopped before the black box the old man
"Ha-hummed" then announced: "The head of
Drakula!"

"Huh?" I responded.

"The head of Drakula," repeated Old
Stefan.

I
stared gape-mouthed toward the old man, trying to decide if this
were some kind of weird Romanian joke; wondering what the punch
line would be. However, there was nothing jocular about his
pale grey eyes, and certainly no trace of a smile about the deep
lines of the pale grey skin of his ancient, time-worn
face.

"What?" I asked, wondering whether I had
misheard, twice. Then after Old Stefan repeated it a second
time, I said, "But Dracula is only a fictional character!"
After all I had read Bram Stoker's novel, of course, and had even
watched Christopher Lee's shadow creep eerily dawn the staircase
in 'The House of Dracula,' in defiance of the legend that
vampires cast no shadow.

"No, no, not the fictional character!"
insisted the old man, "The real Drakula!" Then seeing my blank
look, "Vlad Tepes! When Bram Stoker's novel was first published
inEnglandin 1897, it caused a sensation for more reasons
than one. A lot of people were amazed by the great degree of
accuracy Stoker displayed in the descriptions of theCarpathian
Mountainsin the early parts of the novel. It was rumoured that
the book was actually a fictionalisation of a true story! The
biggest stumbling block to the idea of a real life Dracula --
other than the fact that there is no such thing as a
blood-sucking vampire! -- was the name itself. Historically the
letter 'a' at the end of a name indicates the female form of a
name: Paula female for Paul;Petrafor Peter; Roberta for Robert, and so
on. Which at first led many people to speculate that the real
Dracula might have been a woman. An idea put forward some years
back by Raymond T. McNally in his book, 'Dracula Was a Woman,' in
which he much maligns a distant ancestor of mine, Elizabeth
Bathory. A kind-hearted, god-fearing woman who was cruelly
slandered by the royalty of her time, who accused her of
vampirism, solely as a means of stealing her fortune and
lands...."

The old man "Ha-hummed" again, then continued: "In the
1950s an American of Romanian boyar descent, Radu Florescu,
discovered that in ancient Wallachia the letter 'a' was used at
the end of a word, the same way that the Scottish use '0' or
'Mac' at the front of a word; the Irish use 'Mc'; the French
'du'; the Dutch 'van'; the German 'von'; the Spanish 'de'; the
Italians 'di' or 'da', and so on. In all cases the prefix means
'son of': O'Donald means 'son of Donald'; van Johnson means 'son
of Johnson', de Winters means 'son of Winters', and so on.
Likewise Dracula, or Drakula to use the historically correct
spelling, means son of Drakul. In ancient Romanian, Drakul
means the Devil, so Drakula means 'the son of the
Devil'."

As
discretely as possible I yawned into one hand, trying my best not
to look bored by Old Stefan's history lesson. Glancing down at
my fob watch again, I wondered if I still had time to save my
dinner from the garbage if I made a mad dash for the door
immediately? Obviously sensing my thoughts the old man stepped
between me and the door, fixed me with a withering look, and
continued with his monologue:

"Drakula, or Vlad Tepes as he was more commonly known,
was a descendant of the ancient Wallachian princes. He lived in
the fifteenth century and ruledWallachia,
off-and-on, from about 1450 to 1476. Although worshipped by his
own people, for his valour against the Turks, Drakula was known
outsideTransylvaniamainly for his cruelty and love of
impaling."

Old Man Bathory paused to see what effect this revelation
had on me, and to try to gauge if it had increased his chances of
selling me the shiny, wooden box. After a few seconds he
continued: "Drakula was known for his savage form of justice.
When he first came to power, the country had been bled dry by the
parasitic boyar class, so, to celebrate his coronation Drakula
invited all the boyars to a great feast inside a huge, wooden
building. Then he locked the building tight and burnt it to the
ground, with the boyars still inside. On another occasion a
visiting merchant was robbed while passing through Drakula's
province. Drakula personally reimbursed the merchant, then
tracked down and savagely killed the robbers. On still another
occasion a visiting diplomat refused to doff his cap to the
prince, claiming that it was against his religious beliefs,
although in truth it was intended as a snub. Drakula had the
diplomat's cap nailed to his head to help him practice his
religion.

"However, Drakula's favourite form of barbarity by far,
was impaling. Drakula would have men, women, and children
impaled by the hundreds for little or no reason. He had
sharpened wooden stakes driven up through the anus with men, or
through the vagina with women, taking great care not to kill them
as the stakes were forced high up into their bodies. Then the
stakes would be planted like trees in the great lawns surrounding
Drakula's Castle Bran. The impaled people would writhe around
atop the stakes, sometimes for hours or even days before dying.
Sometimes Drakula would have so many people impaled that the
stakes would be as plentiful as a forest of trees. On such
occasions Drakula liked to sit at a wooden table beneath the
stakes to feast, revelling in the stench of decay from the dead
and the piteous screams of the dying. On one such occasion a
visiting envoy complained about the stench, so Drakula had him
impaled upon a much longer stake so that the envoy would be above
and thus out of reach of the stench."

I
stood in silence staring at the black box for a few seconds,
before realising that Old Stefan had finished his monologue.
"What has all this got to do with a black painted box?" I said at
last.

"Not painted!" insisted Old Man Bathory indignantly.
"Black wood!"

"From the enchanted forest, no doubt?" I suggested,
receiving another withering look from Old Man
Bathory.

At
last, seeing that his evil-eye had failed to paralyse me, the old
man said, "Black wood from the lush forests of fifteenth
centuryTransylvania,
polished to a royal sheen, as befitting the head of a Wallachian
prince. And inside this black box, rests the head of the
infamous Prince Drakula himself!"

I
thought about Old Stefan's claim for a moment, before saying,
"But I thought that vampires had to be impaled through the
heart!"

The old man fixed me with his evil-eye, which almost
seemed as though it were about to pop out of its socket from rage
at my stupidity. "Forget about vampires!" he bellowed. "This
box contains the head of a fifteenth century Romanian prince,
Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Tepes, also known as Drakula. The idea
of impaling vampires through the heart is obviously a historical
error; a corruption of Drakula's habit of impaling his enemies of
spikes...Although...."

He
stopped to rub the light fuzz on his chin ruminatively for a few
moments, as though trying to dredge up some personal memory of
Vlad Drakula. It was an only too obvious stage effect, to
attempt to justify whatever weird and wonderful revelation Old
Stefan chose to conjure up, in a bid to con me into buying the
shiny black box. A box which could contain almost anything --
or nothing at all for that matter -- except the head of a 500
year old Wallachian prince.

Finally he said, "Come to think of it though, Drakula was
impaled himself, or at least his head was...He was killed by his
own men after dressing up as a Turk, to sneak down to spy on the
invading Turkish army. The Turks then overranWallachiaand found Drakula's corpse. They beheaded the body,
which they burnt, then impaled the head in plain view so that the
Wallachians would know that Drakula was dead and could never
return to help expel them. The head of Drakula stayed impaled
for nearly a week before being taken down and secreted away by
one of my ancestors, Gregori Bathory....

"The head of Drakula has remained in my family for the
last 500 years. It was taken fromWallachiatoEnglandin the
1480s, then to theUSA, via
the Mayflower, in 1620, then finally toVictoriaseventy
years ago when my wife, Bella, and I emigrated toAustralia."

I
couldn't help smiling at the clever way that Old Man Bathory had
explained away the problem of how the skull had travelled nearly
16,000 kilometres and 500 years, from fifteenth
centuryWallachiato
twentieth centuryAustralia.

Seeing my smile and obviously mistaking it for a smile of
satisfaction, Old Stefan hurried to add, "So naturally I could
not part with such a rare and valuable, family heirloom too
cheaply."

"How, not too cheaply?" I asked, and to hell with
grammar.

"Ten dollars?" suggested the old man hopefully, before
quickly amending it to; "Eight dollars? Six dollars? Five
dollars?"

"How do I know there's anything in the box at all?" I
asked, deciding to myself that at $5 it was a good buy, even if
the box was empty. It would do more than passably as a birthday
present for Irene, as a jewellery box or some such thing.
Unless, of course, it really did contain the 500 year old head of
a dead Wallachian prince, in which case it would probably join my
dinner in the garbage bin. The box was a good size, certainly
large enough to contain an average-sized head, glossy black, with
an intricately embossed, expensive-looking gold coloured latch
and keyhole, minus a key. A fact which I quickly brought to the
attention of Old Stefan.

Looking startled the old man demanded to know, "What do
you want a key for?" As though it were a totally unreasonable
request.

"What's the point in owning a locked box, without a key
to unlock it?" I asked.

"It contains the rotting head of a 500 year old
Wallachian prince," insisted Old Man Bathory. "What would you
want to look at it for?" Which would have been a perfectly
reasonable question, if the old man hadn't already forced me to
sacrifice my evening meal to the garbage bin, in a bid to talk me
into purchasing the black box.

"How do I know there's anything in the box at all?" I
said for the second time, to the obvious consternation of Old
Stefan. Whose look of consternation quickly changed to one of
alarm when I held it up to ear level and began to shake the box
gently in a bid to determine the contents.

"Watch out!" warned Old Man Bathory as an ear-piercing
shriek rang out from the ornate keyhole, causing me to drop the
black wooden box to the concrete floor of the small second-hand
shop.

"It does that sometimes," explained the old man, as the
blood drained from my face and I began to run toward the door to
the outside street. Of course, I had read the various accounts,
both "fact" and fiction alike, of "screaming skulls" --.
decapitated heads which let out piercing shrieks for one reason
or another. But to encounter one for myself in real life was a
little more than I was able to cope with.

It
was only as my feet touched the bitumen footpath outside the shop
that I realised that it was obviously a sales gimmick which had
gone wrong. As the wooden box hit the hard concrete floor and
smashed to pieces, Old Stefan had let out a scream almost as
dreadful as the one which had resounded from within the shiny
black wood box. Obviously, I realised, the old man's scream had
been a scream of dismay at the loss of a valuable piece of
bric-a-brac, which he had spent an awful lot of time over,
devising an elaborate sales pitch.

Cupping my bands in front of the glass to shield out the
sunlight, I peered into the small shop, expecting to see Old Man
Bathory, brush and sweep in hand, kneeling over the splintered
remains of the wooden box.

Instead the old man stood at the back of the shop,
staring down in horror toward the broken curio. The shattered
box rustled and moved with a life of its own, like a gopher hole
about to burst open to reveal a cute, furry little creature...But
there was nothing cute or furry about the dirty, cracked and
pitted skull which slowly burrowed its way out from under the
small pile of rubble, to stare with vacant eye sockets toward
where Old Stefan stood trembling half a dozen metres
away.

After a moment the skull let out another piercing shriek,
then hurtled through the air like a thrown baseball...Straight
for the old man's neck, where the skull attached itself to the
jugular vein and began to suck Old Stefan's
blood.

As
the skull drank, it slowly began to regenerate. The dirty black
cracks began to close up and the faded greyish tinge began to
give way to a gleaming bone white. Then flesh began to reappear
upon the bone and the vacant eye sockets filled out with large,
bloodshot yellow eyes. A thick bushy moustache sprouted beneath
the newly formed, prominent nose; bushy brows grew above the
eyes, and dark hair began to trail down to the start of where its
back should have been.

That was all I saw before turning to
flee.

*
* *

A
few days later I did some research at the local library and
discovered a few facts about Vlad Tepes that Stefan Bathory
hadn't known, or had forgotten. The old man was right about
Drakula meaning "son of the Devil", however, it also meant "son
of the dragon". And in ancient Bulgarian the words for dragon
and vampire were interchangeable. Also, during his life time
Drakula had been accused of vampirism. (Although admittedly only
by the Turks, who had a vested interest in defaming Drakula who
was the only thing preventing them from overrunningWallachia!) Old
Stefan had been only half right about Drakula's beheading.
Drakula's head had been impaled upon a stake to demoralise the
people of Wallachia, however, that was not the reason for his
beheading. The idea of impaling a vampire through the heart is
fiction invented byHollywood. In
Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula was killed by being beheaded with a
Bowie knife. And, to this day, outside of movies, beheading is
the only known way to kill a vampire! However, unbeknown to the
Turks, you must then burn the head and body separately and
scatter the ashes in two separate places, or else the body (or
head!) can regenerate itself again into a whole
vampire!